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Contemporary Debates in Contemporary Debates in

In teaching and research, philosophy makes progress through argumentation and debate. Contemporary Debates in Philosophy provides a forum for students and their teachers to follow and participate in the debates that animate philosophy today in the western world. Each volume presents pairs of opposing viewpoints on contested themes and topics in the central subfi elds of philosophy. Each volume is edited and introduced by an expert in the fi eld, and also includes an index, bibliography, and suggestions for further reading. The opposing essays, commissioned especially for the volumes in the series, are thorough but accessible presentations of opposing points of view.

1. Contemporary Debates in edited by Michael L. Peterson and Raymond J. Vanarragon 2. Contemporary Debates in Philosophy of Science edited by Christopher Hitchcock 3. Contemporary Debates in edited by Matthias Steup and Ernest Sosa 4. Contemporary Debates in Applied Ethics edited by Andrew I. Cohen and Christopher Heath Wellman 5. Contemporary Debates in Aesthetics and the Philosophy of Art edited by Matthew Kieran 6. Contemporary Debates in Moral Theory edited by James Dreier 7. Contemporary Debates in Cognitive Science edited by Robert Stainton 8. Contemporary Debates in edited by Brian McLaughlin and Jonathan Cohen 9. Contemporary Debates in Social Philosophy edited by Laurence Thomas 10. Contemporary Debates in Metaphysics edited by , , and Dean W. Zimmerman

Forthcoming Contemporary Debates are in:

Political Philosophy edited by Thomas Christiano and John Christman Philosophy of Biology edited by Francisco J. Ayala and Robert Arp Philosophy of edited by Ernie Lepore Contemporary Debates in Metaphysics

Edited by Theodore Sider, John Hawthorne, and Dean W. Zimmerman © 2008 by Blackwell Publishing Ltd BLACKWELL PUBLISHING 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148-5020, USA 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK 550 Swanston Street, Carlton, Victoria 3053, Australia The right of Theodore Sider, John Hawthorne, and Dean W. Zimmerman to be identifi ed as the authors of the editorial material in this work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs, and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, except as permitted by the UK Copyright, Designs, and Patents Act 1988, without the prior permission of the publisher. Designations used by companies to distinguish their products are often claimed as trademarks. All brand names and product names used in this book are trade names, service marks, trademarks, or registered trademarks of their respective owners. The publisher is not associated with any product or vendor mentioned in this book. This publication is designed to provide accurate and authoritative information in regard to the subject matter covered. It is sold on the understanding that the publisher is not engaged in rendering professional services. If professional advice or other expert assistance is required, the services of a competent professional should be sought. First published 2008 by Blackwell Publishing Ltd 1 2008 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Contemporary debates in metaphysics / edited by Theodore Sider, John Hawthorne, and Dean W. Zimmerman. p. cm. — (Contemporary debates in philosophy) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-4051-1228-4 (hardcover : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-1-4051-1229-1 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Metaphysics. I. Sider, Theodore. II. Hawthorne, John (John P.) III. Zimmerman, Dean W. BD95.C66 2007 110—dc22 2007019836 A catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library. Set in 10 on 12.5 pt Rotis Serif by SNP Best-set Typesetter Ltd., Hong Kong Printed and bound in Singapore by Markono Print Media Pte Ltd. The publisher’s policy is to use permanent paper from mills that operate a sustainable forestry policy, and which has been manufactured from pulp processed using acid-free and elementary chlorine-free practices. Furthermore, the publisher ensures that the text paper and cover board used have met acceptable environmental accreditation standards. For further information on Blackwell Publishing, visit our website at www.blackwellpublishing.com Contents

Notes on Contributors vii

Introduction Theodore Sider 1

ABSTRACT ENTITIES 9 1.1 Abstract Entities Chris Swoyer 11 1.2 There Are No Abstract Objects Cian Dorr 32

CAUSATION AND LAWS OF NATURE 65 2.1 Nailed to Hume’s Cross? John W. Carroll 67 2.2 Causation and Laws of Nature: Reductionism Jonathan Schaffer 82

MODALITY AND POSSIBLE WORLDS 109 3.1 Concrete Possible Worlds Phillip Bricker 111 3.2 Ersatz Possible Worlds Joseph Melia 135

PERSONAL 153 4.1 People and Their Bodies Judith Jarvis Thomson 155 4.2 Persons, Bodies, and Human Beings Derek Parfi t 177

TIME 209 5.1 The Privileged Present: Defending an “A-Theory” of Time 211 5.2 The Tenseless Theory of Time J. J. C. Smart 226 PERSISTENCE 239 6.1 Temporal Parts Theodore Sider 241 6.2 Three-Dimensionalism vs. Four-Dimensionalism John Hawthorne 263

FREE WILL 283 7.1 Incompatibilism Robert Kane 285 7.2 Compatibilism, Incompatibilism, and Impossibilism Kadri Vihvelin 303

MEREOLOGY 319 8.1 The Moon and Sixpence: A Defense of Mereological Universalism James Van Cleve 321 8.2 Restricted Composition Ned Markosian 341

METAONTOLOGY 365 9.1 Ontological Arguments: Interpretive Charity and Quantifi er Variance Eli Hirsch 367 9.2 The Picture of Reality as an Amorphous Lump Matti Eklund 382

Index 397

Contents vi Notes on Contributors

Phillip Bricker is Professor and Head of Philosophy at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. His interests range broadly over metaphysics, , philosophy of science, and philosophy of mathematics.

John W. Carroll is Professor of Philosophy at NC State University in Raleigh, North Carolina. He works in the areas of metaphysics and the philosophy of science. His interests center on the topics of laws of nature, causation, explanation, and time travel. He is the author of Laws of Nature (Cambridge University Press, 1994) and such articles as “ and the Laws of Nature” (Australasian Journal of Philoso- phy, 1987), “The Humean Tradition” (Philosophical Review, 1990), “-Level Causation?” (Philosophical Studies, 1991), and “The Two Dams and that Damned Paresis” (British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, 1999). He is the editor of Readings on Laws of Nature (Pittsburgh University Press, 2004).

Cian Dorr received his BA from University College Cork, and his PhD from the Uni- versity of Princeton, where he was a student of the late David Lewis. He is currently Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the University of Pittsburgh.

Matti Eklund is an Associate Professor of Philosophy at . He has published articles in metaphysics, , and philosophy of logic.

John Hawthorne is Waynfl ete Professor of Metaphysical Philosophy at the . He is author of Metaphysical Essays (Clarendon Press, 2006), and has published widely in metaphysics, epistemology, philosophy of language, and Leibniz studies. Eli Hirsch is Professor of Philosophy at Brandeis University. He is the author of a number of works in metaphysics, including Dividing Reality (, 1993).

Robert Kane is University Distinguished Teaching Professor of Philosophy at the University of Texas at Austin. He is author of The Signifi cance of Free Will (Oxford University Press, 1996), Through the Moral Maze (Paragon House, 1994), A Contem- porary Introduction to Free Will (Oxford University Press, 2005) and editor of The Oxford Handbook of Free Will (2002), among other works in the philosophy of mind and ethics.

Ned Markosian is a philosophy professor at Western Washington University. He grew up in Montclair, New Jersey, graduated from Oberlin College, and received a PhD from the University of Massachusetts. He has worked mainly on issues in the philoso- phy of time and the mereology of physical objects.

Joseph Melia is a Reader in Metaphysics at the University of Leeds. His main interests are in modality, ontology, and the philosophy of physics. He is currently working on a book on ontology.

Derek Parfi t was born in China in 1942 and received an undergraduate degree in Modern History at Oxford in 1964. Since 1967 he has been a Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford. He has often taught in the United States, and is now a regular Visit- ing Professor to the Departments of Philosophy of Rutgers, , and Harvard. His fi rst book, Reasons and Persons, was published by Oxford University Press in 1984. A second book, Climbing the Mountain, is nearly completed, and will also be published by Oxford University Press. This book will be about reasons and rationality, Kant’s ethics, contractualism, and consequentialism.

Jonathan Schaffer is Professor of Philosophy at the Australian National University. He works mainly in metaphysics and epistemology. Further information about his work may be found on his website: .

Theodore Sider is Professor of Philosophy at New York University. He has pub- lished articles in metaphysics and philosophy of language, is the author of Four- Dimensionalism (Oxford University Press, 2001), and is co-author (with Earl Conee) of Riddles of Existence: A Guided Tour of Metaphysics (Oxford University Press, 2005).

J. J. C. Smart is Emeritus Professor, Australian National University, and is now living in Melbourne. He is an honorary in the School of Philosophy and Bioethics at Monash University. His most recent publication is a paper “Metaphysical Illusions” which is pertinent to the chapter in the present volume.

Chris Swoyer is Professor of Philosophy and Affi liated Professor of Cognitive Psy- chology at the University of Oklahoma. He has published, and continues to work on, Notes on Contributors viii the philosophy of logic, metaphysics, philosophy of science, and history of modern philosophy (especially Leibniz).

Judith Jarvis Thomson is Professor of Philosophy at MIT. Her published work is on topics in moral theory, metaethics, and metaphysics.

James Van Cleve taught for many years at Brown University and is now Professor of Philosophy at the University of Southern California. He works in metaphysics, epistemology, and the history of modern philosophy.

Kadri Vihvelin is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Southern California. Her publications include “The Dif” (Journal of Philosophy, 2005); “Freedom, Foreknowledge, and the Principle of Alternate Possibilities” (Canadian Journal of Philosophy, 2000); “What Time Travelers Cannot Do” (Philosophical Studies, 1996); “Causes, Effects, and Counterfactual Dependence” (Australasian Journal of Philoso- phy, 1995); and “Stop Me Before I Kill Again” (Philosophical Studies, 1994).

Dean W. Zimmerman is an Associate Professor in the Philosophy Department at . He is editor of Oxford Studies in Metaphysics and author of numer- ous articles in metaphysics and philosophy of religion.

Notes on Contributors ix

Introduction

Theodore Sider

There is something strange about metaphysics. Two strange things, really, although they are related. Metaphysics asks what the world is like.1 But the world is a big and varied place. How can one meaningfully ask what apples, planets, galaxies, tables, chairs, air conditioners, computers, works of art, cities, electrons, molecules, people, societies . . . are like? The question is hopelessly general and abstract! One would normally ask fi rst what apples are like, and then ask what planets and the rest are like separately. What meaningful questions are there about such a broad and hetero- geneous subject matter? Furthermore, you’d think that you’d need to ask a biologist what apples are like, an astronomer what planets are like, and so on. What can a contribute? Let’s have a look. Consider a certain apple. What is it like? Well, it’s red, and it’s round. But this information doesn’t come to us from philosophy. We need to observe the apple to learn its color and shape. Consider another thing, Mars. It has iron oxide on its surface, and it is 6.4185 × 1023 kg in mass. This information about Mars, again, isn’t something that philosophy can tell us about; we learn it from astronomers. So far, we have found no philosophical subject matter. But if we abstract from certain details, we fi nd things in common between our two examples; we fi nd a recurring pattern despite the diverse subject matters. Here are the facts we cited:

The apple is red Mars has iron oxide on its surface The apple is round Mars is 6.4185 × 1023 kg in mass

Notice that in each case, an object is said to have a feature. For example, in the fi rst case, the object is the apple, and the feature is being red. call objects that have features particulars, and they call the features “had” by particulars proper- ties. Thus, we have:

The apple is red Mars has iron oxide on its surface · · · · · · particular property particular property

The apple is round Mars is 6.4185 × 1023 kg in mass · · · · · · particular property particular property

In fact, this pattern is quite general. Think of other facts:

Fact particular property This table is broken the table being broken Electron e is negatively charged electron e negative charge The stock market crashed the stock market crashing

The particular-property pattern keeps recurring. It appears that every fact about the world boils down to particulars having properties.2 So it would seem that the world contains two different sorts of entities: particulars and properties. We have already uncovered a general fact about the world. Just as a scientist establishes generaliza- tions about what the world is like in some limited sphere (for instance that charged particles repel one another or that the planets move in elliptical orbits), we have established a generalization – albeit a much broader and more abstract one – about the world. And we did it without detailed input from the sciences. Of course, since this is philosophy we are talking about, there is controversy at every turn. The that there are two different sorts of objects in the world, particulars and properties, can be challenged. Nominalists, for example, believe in particulars, but not in properties. According to a nominalist, there simply is no such thing as the property of being red. Put that baldly, the statement is misleading. It suggests that nominalists think that there is no such thing as a red object. But nominalists are not crazy. They agree that red objects exist; they just deny that redness exists. The nominalist’s position can be made clearer by thinking about the ‘The apple is red’. The nominalist agrees that the sentence is true. But now, consider the two parts of the sentence: its subject, ‘The apple’, and its predicate, ‘is red’. What the nominalist thinks is that, whereas the subject does stand for an object (namely, the particular in question, the apple), the predicate does not stand for an object. The predicate ‘is red’ is of course meaningful; it’s just that it doesn’t stand for an object. Just as a comma is meaningful without standing for an object, predicates can be meaningful without standing for objects. The apple is red, even though there is no such thing as its redness. We talk as if there are lots of things, when really, those things don’t exist. We talk, for instance, as if there are such things as holes. We’ll say: “Look at the size of that hole in the wall!” “Bring me the piece of cheese with three holes in it.” “I can’t wear that shirt because there is a hole in it.” But surely there aren’t really such things Theodore Sider 2 as holes, are there? What kind of object would a hole be? Surely what really exist are the physical objects that the holes are “in”: walls, pieces of cheese, shirts, and so on. When one of these physical objects has an appropriate shape – namely, a perfo- rated shape – we’ll sometimes say that “there is a hole in it.” But we don’t really mean by this that there literally exists an extra entity, a hole, which is somehow made up of nothingness. The nominalist thinks that all subject-predicate sentences are a bit like sentences about holes. It might seem at fi rst that the predicates refer to entities, but they really don’t. Are nominalists right? Do properties exist or don’t they? This is no easy question, and Chris Swoyer and Cian Dorr (chapter 1) come to opposite conclusions on this and related matters. But in this brief look at , we have at least glimpsed what metaphysicians are after: patterns in apparently diverse phenomena, and generaliza- tions that accurately describe these patterns. This book contains chapters in a number of areas of metaphysics; in each area, the goal is to fi nd generalizations about abstract patterns: Necessity Scientists tell us of the laws of nature. Physicists tell us of the laws of physics, for example that like-charged particles must repel one another. Chemists tell us of the laws of chemistry, for example that if methane reacts with oxygen, it must produce carbon dioxide and water. Economists tell us of the laws of economics, for example that when demand increases then prices must increase as well. In each case, we have scientists telling us what must happen in certain conditions. What exactly are these laws of nature; what is the status of these “musts”? Laws of society exist because governing bodies have legislated them. But there is no governing body that has leg- islated the laws of nature. Physicists try to discover the laws of physics; they do not create them (chapter 2). And if everything happens as these laws of nature specify, human actions must conform to their dictates. How then can we have free will (chapter 7)? Further, there are other cases of “mustness”. Every bachelor must be male; every prime number other than two must be odd. In what does the mustness of these facts consist (chapter 3)? Time Objects of all sorts, the objects of physics, chemistry, biology, and other sciences, last over time. This raises many philosophical questions. What does it mean for the same object to exist over time? A person at age 50, for instance, is the same person as she was as a child, even though nearly all of the matter that made up her body as a child no longer is with her at age 50. What makes a person the same over time? And indeed, what is it for time to pass at all (chapters 4–6)? Ontology Different sciences describe different objects. Physics describes subatomic particles, biology describes organisms, and so on. But must we believe that the objects from each science really exist? Consider organisms, for example. Could we not stick with the physicist’s objects, and say that the only objects that really exist are subatomic particles? We could still agree that there are distinctively biological phenomena, even though there do not exist distinctively biological objects. For even if human organisms Introduction 3